Not OP, but I highly recommend Cryptograms as a word puzzle you can do on paper if you’re trying to get off your phone for a while (I bought a book of 500 and it’s been great). The learning curve isn’t too intense, and each puzzle is different enough from the last that they don’t lose their challenge over time.

I’m also the creator of an app called Sootly, if you’re looking for a deeply stressful game of word guessing and deductive logic. It’s a free app with no ads, for the record, so no motive of financial gain here.

Is Unreal worse than Unity? I’ve only ever heard people complain about the latter

I wish you would be friends with me instead

You got me. Mastercard: the credit card for neurodivergents, assholes, and everything in between

Hey that’s valid! A good friend of mine has the exact same thing. He’s up front about it, he apologizes when it’s excessive, and he’s more than happy to explain why it’s difficult for him. It’s just a thing, and if I’m going to be his friend, that means accepting it about him.

In other words, he’s done his best to help me understand him. Now it’s my turn to not be an asshole.

I think (hope) most people can tell the difference between symptoms of atypical neurology (lateness, awkwardness, forgetfulness, zoning out et al) and hurtful/abusive/controlling behavior. And if they can’t, they’re just not our people. That’s a whole different Venn diagram though

Well said and point well taken.

I always encourage people to communicate, gently and clearly, what the other person did that was hurtful. I have so much empathy for people who are clueless (hi, hello, it’s me). But no empathy at all for people who callously, intentionally harass and hurt others.

This is valid criticism and I’m going to sit with it.

All the same, most of the (adult) autistic folks I’ve known in my life have been quick to apologize and take responsibility, even when other peoples’ reactions don’t make sense to them.

Or a simple, “hey, that was rude. It hurt my feelings.” Most of the ND people I know would respond, “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to be a jerk. I’ll do better.”

This is true! But there’s a very easy way to tell the difference.

When you find out you hurt someone’s feelings, do you apologize, express how terrible you feel about it, and try to do better? Not an asshole.

Do you double down, make excuses, and blame them for feeling bad? Asshole.

Saying the wrong thing doesn’t make you a jerk. Not caring about other people’s feelings, does.

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I’m gonna sound a little “old man yells at cloud” here, but the majority of original movies are trying to jam way too much into a 2-hour runtime. Characters are dropped into the plot out of nowhere, protagonists change their minds for no apparent reason, 30-second montages are substituted for meaningful emotional beats, the pacing feels rushed after the first half hour, it’s just a mess of stuff happening because the scriptwriter wanted it to. (Or maybe it’s the editor’s fault, idk, I don’t make movies.) A movie is the same length as a short story, not a novel, and trying to do a novel is going to make it feel like a super-long trailer instead of a movie 99% of the time. Critics are gonna pan it and no one is gonna watch it.

Sequels and franchise films can sometimes overcome this by benefit of familiar terrain. You already know the setting, you already know the characters, so we don’t need to spend time on that. It’s a definite advantage.

(The downside is that a lot of sequels forget to tell a story. I didn’t tune in to “hang out” with my favorite superheroes. I was expecting, y’know, an emotionally compelling plot.)

Ate the plane

https://youtu.be/B5zvp480jMc

That would be Edward Jenner. He saved more lives than anyone else in history, and that number increases by the day. If it were up to me, his birthday would be an international holiday and kids would learn his name in elementary school.

For anyone who likes the video: definitely read The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus. Exurb1a does a solid job summarizing it, much better than most YouTubers, but skips a lot in order to keep the video short. It’s a very accessible book, especially if you skim the Kierkegaard stuff, and the core of it is strenuously punk and badass.

Of note: Camus doesn’t just think you should live in defiance of a meaningless universe. He argues that you should live as long as possible, experience as much as you can, repeatedly do what you love most even to the exclusion of everything else. Absurdism is not mere hedonism nor optimistic nihilism; its rebellion is tenacious, passionate, intentional, and incapable of passivity.

For a followup read, I recommend Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, which is a great crash course in staring into the abyss.

+1 for biking. I track my bike rides with Apple Health and it’s pretty solid, I don’t know if it would be hard to make those importable to the game.

Maybe not documented as such, but it’s understood to be correlated (especially in terms of “risky behaviors”), likely by way of chronic understimulation.

In layman’s terms: brain never gets the reward chemicals it needs > sex is a reliable source of reward chemicals > okay we’re obsessed with it now

Your novel may be well-written. I wouldn’t risk a guess. All I know is the worst writers I’ve ever met have also been the most convinced they were God’s gift to literature.

That said, I can sympathize. Selling a story is hard, and luck is a huge factor. If the next Hemingway is out there, they’re probably getting sick of hearing “sorry, this story didn’t work for us. We wish you the best in placing it elsewhere.”

Holy butts, why has no one ever said this sentence to me before

And at 100C, it changes phase to Heeheehoo. Lotta people don’t know that